What It's REALLY All About

Gore told the Washington Post, “ ‘The simple algorithm [sic] is this: It’s important to change the light bulbs, but it’s much more important to change the laws,’ he said. ‘The options available to civilization worldwide to avert this terribly destructive pattern are beginning to slip away from us. The path for recovery runs right through Washington, D.C.’ ”

There it is, folks. In black and white. It's all about making you behave. Because you can't be trusted to change the light bulbs.

Never mind that the earth hasn't warmed in the last ten years.

A Bristlebot

I want to make one. Don't you?

A dog mosaic

Put Panda in! I just put him in as Panda16, using this picture:


Within 24 to 48 hours you should be able to find him by searching "Panda16" (It's kinda fun to look at Pandas 1 through 15. None, of course, are nearly as cute.)

It has to be a horizontal rather than a vertical shot, and they say it has to be a "close-up," though it looks as if their definition's pretty lax.

How many Pandas can we get in there? And we need Hobbes, too!

The first day of spring

as seen at Google:

as seen at weather.com:

Make a snowflake

Here.

An essay Dad will love

by David Mamet, of all people.

Grandma Murphy Moves

The inimitable Grandma Murphy has moved from her spacious dwelling on Bridge Road to a unit half the size at Rock Ridge which, yes, is the town in Blazing Saddles. On the plus side, there will be more activities there, more people available to socialize with, more supervision and assistance for her, and more transportation and organized trips. G'ma Murphy knows how to live life to the fullest. Rock Ridge will be a better place for her to live, and besides, the sheriff is near.



There is a new resident intro published in the RR newsletter for, yup, new residents, and this is hers:

NAME: Edna Murphy
WHERE ARE YOU FROM: I was born and raised on a farm in Conway, Ma. Recently from Lathrop Community in Northampton, Ma.
FAMILY: I have 5 children, 3 boys and 2 girls. They live in California, Connecticut, New York State, Maine, and one is local. I also have a cat named Clyde.
THINGS YOU LIKE TO DO: I like to keep very active and busy. I like to go out and do things and am looking forward to the programs offered at RockRidge, especially the outings. I also like to go for walks, knit and play pitch.
FAVORITE FOOD: I like everything, but lobster is on the top of the list.
LEAST KNOWN FACT ABOUT ME: After my mom died at 50 years of age, I had always wished that my Dad had remarried. There were plenty of eligible ladies but he never was interested. I always wondered if he didn't remarry so that he could devote his time and energy to me.
FARTHEST PLACE YOU HAVE TRAVELED: Many years ago, my husband and I traveled to Alaska.
FAVORITE MUSIC: Music from the 40s (I was in my 20s)
WHAT DO YOU WASTE YOUR MONEY ON: My 5:00 p. m. cocktail.
WHAT HAS BEEN DIFFICULT ABOUT AGING: Giving up driving.
ONE THING YOU WOULD CHANGE ABOUT YOUR SELF: It is not easy for me to mix with people I don't know. I wish I was better at engaging with people in social situations.
WHOM DO YOU MOST ADMIRE:My sister-in-law who raised 8 children, 7 of which were girls! We were very, very close. She is now deceased and I miss her.
FUNNIEST MEMORY: when I was 12 years old, my parents got me a Shetland pony. The pony was also 12 years old, and quite used to doing what he wanted. He had a mind of his own and took me on rides where HE wanted to go!

That's a big tree.

How 'bout that Michelle Obama?

Didja read her New Yorker interview? Woo-hoo! Life's a bitch and it's just been getting worse and worse. And she even had to pay off her student loans! And it was SOO difficult. Never mind that they were probably subsidized by taxpayers.

Some highlights:

"We’re a divided country, we’re a country that is just downright mean, we are guided by fear, we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day. Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

What? How are we slothful, cynical, and complacent, yet struggling. Doesn't sound like we're struggling all that hard if we're so slothful and complacent.

"The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”

Oh, boo-hoo. You were a child then. You are an adult now. Get used to it. Suck it up a little bit. Didn't you got to Princeton and Harvard?

“You know, in my household, over the last year we have just shifted to organic for this very reason. I mean, I saw just a moment in my nine-year-old’s life—we have a good pediatrician, who is very focussed on childhood obesity, and there was a period where he was, like, ‘Mmm, she’s tipping the scale.’ So we started looking through our cabinets. . . . You know, you’ve got fast food on Saturday, a couple days a week you don’t get home. The leftovers, good, not the third day! . . . So that whole notion of cooking on Sunday is out. . . . And the notion of trying to think about a lunch every day! . . . So you grab the Lunchables, right? And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think—we think—that’s juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there’s high-fructose corn syrup in everything we’re eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything that’s in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don’t even know. . . . Now we’re keeping, like, a bowl of fresh fruit in the house. But you have to go to the fruit stand a couple of times a week to keep that fruit fresh enough that a six-year-old—she’s not gonna eat the pruney grape, you know. At that point it’s, like, ‘Eww!’ She’s not gonna eat the brown banana or the shrivelledy-up things. It’s got to be fresh for them to want it. Who’s got time to go to the fruit stand? Who can afford it, first of all?”

You really, really, really could not make this stuff up.

Grievance, grievance, grievance.

Hillary, I love you. Relatively speaking.

A SiteMeter Mystery

I scrolled down to peek at SiteMeter just now, and it said 27,000.

27,000 visits! Holy smoke!

I thought I'd memorialize it by pasting it into this post, so I copied the image and pasted it over here. But somehow, post-copying and pre-pasting, it ticked up another visit, all by itself. See?

Human Tetris

Explanation here.

The earth and the moon

Seen from Mars. Click to enlarge.